World Cultures and Comparative American Studies

Date: Spring 1998
Copyright 1998, Five Colleges Ink
Reprinted with permission.

Crossroads in the Study of the Americas

The newest Five College center is a curricular and co-curricular project called Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA). Now well into its first phase of planning with the support of a three-year grant of $135,500 from The Teagle Foundation, the Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas will by fall occupy a space of its own on the Smith campus at 8 College Lane. This spring, it was announced that Robbie Schwartzwald, a professor of French and Francophone Literature in the University's Department of French and Italian Studies, had been selected by a committee of peers to serve as its director. Schwartzwald assumes duties with the Center already well acquainted with Five College matters, having served for many years as the chair of the Five College Canadian Studies Program.

Although CISA is only a few months old, it has already embarked on an ambitious range of activities involving almost a hundred faculty members in a wide range of disciplines at all five campuses including the liberal arts, the sciences, and the professional schools at the University. It was the Board of Directors of Five Colleges, Incorporated who encouraged the discussions that led up to the creation of the new center. In their proposal to Teagle, they sought an open-ended planning grant that would "reverse a trend visible on our campuses as on campuses across the country ... a fragmentation of the curriculum ... [that] derives from well-intended efforts to meet curricular needs arising from new scholarly understandings of ethnic difference in America." What form that new collaborative approach to the study of the Americas might take they left to the faculty to determine.

In the interview that follows, CISA's new director describes the process through which the idea for a center evolved, as well as the goals and expectations he and his colleagues have for it.

Q: How did you settle on the title for the Center as Crossroads in the Study of the Americas?

RS: Well, we came up, first of all, with a number of things that we didn't want to be. We didn't want to be limited to the United States of America; we didn't want to be a comparative hemispheric program--the United States and the rest-which inevitably leads to a north--south structuring in which the United States becomes the dominant term. So we eliminated the binary model and adopted a triangular approach. The first of the three points on the triangle we called 'Old World societies' defined not by Europe but by the three continents from which people came, or were forcibly brought, to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The second we called 'New World polities'--the 'nation-states' of the Americas. And the third point on the triangle was made up of the indigenous peoples, or what are sometimes called the "First Nations," or Native Americans. It was in the space created by this triangle that we wanted the Center's program to be developed. The triangular concept, we feel, will enable us to reconfigure a series of very traditional assumptions about the Americas and about the American experience.

And once we'd settled some of the issues about what kind of program we wanted, we decided that the focus of our work, really the core of our identity, should be curriculum development at the undergraduate level.

Q: Could we talk next about the conceptualization process that led up to the establishment of the Center? How did it work with so many different perspectives and so many different disciplines around the table, so to speak?

RS: When we began we couldn't fit around the table, of course, because the whole initiative was launched with three large public forums, the first of which was hosted by Smith President Ruth Simmons on behalf of the Five College Board of Directors. At the first meeting in January of 1997, at least a hundred people attended, including faculty, administrators, and students from all the colleges. President Simmons opened discussion, I recall, by talking a little bit about what had motivated her concern, and what the Directors had in mind in applying for this grant from Teagle. In response, some people stood up and talked about their experiences in different area studies programs, including American Studies, Afro-American and Latin American studies programs already established; some talked about what ethnic studies might mean, or questioned whether we should be loooking at issues of ethnicity solely within the borders of the United States, or whether we ought to be considering these issues throughout the Americas. Questions were also raised about language: If we were to have a program on the Americas, what would the role of various languages be?

In short, there were a lot of questions, a lot of reservations, and a lot of caveats. Nonetheless, by the end of that first meeting, my impression was that people walked away quite convinced that it was worth going on, and, indeed, I found myself among one of the hundred or more who subsequently showed up at a second meeting at Mount Holyoke College a little later in the semester. At that meeting four speakers from American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs elsewhere in the country had come to talk about the kinds of questions they had had to confront in shaping their programs. A third similarly well-attended meeting confirmed a desire on the part of faculty to use the grant as an opportunity to develop something new.

The next step involved a much more intensive process. About 30 or 40 people responded to a call for a two-day retreat session in Vermont. It was really through a series of discussions at that meeting attended by faculty as well as administrators that we hammered out a program and concluded that the best vehicle for that program would be a Center. Up until that point, there had been no particular form proposed. It could have been another program with or without a degree, it could have been a research center or a curricular initiative ...

Q: There must have been some hang-ups to be overcome, fears to be allayed in the discussion process.

RS. Initially, there was a great deal of concern in many quarters that this not result in some umbrella under which existing programs would be subsumed into a more traditional American Studies program. What kept people talking was the fact that there was no preconception about the kind of program the grant might support and what form it should take. Also, we had models of programs elsewhere not within the traditional American Studies mode, yet successful in different ways.

The other concern had to do with area studies. The five colleges have a number of area studies programs that people have worked very hard to develop, so there was great reluctance to support anything that might call the existence of those programs into question. What we wanted was some structure through which the various area studies programs could talk to each other around common issues of concern.

Q: You seem to be suggesting that the focus of the Center is on teaching as opposed to research: Is that accurate?

RS: This doesn't mean we aren't interested in people's research. On the contrary: We're extraordinarily interested in the individual faculty member's scholarly work. But what we want them to do is bring that to the table and share it with people outside their own fields, outside their own colleges, outside the usual frameworks in which they work, to try and develop courses together that will challenge students to think along interdisciplinary lines from the very beginning of their educational experience.

And that's quite a challenge--you get people around the table from different disciplines, who sometimes use the same terms, or the same key words, but understand them very differently. At first it's hard enough for them to have to explain what they mean to each other. It gets harder when you ask, "Well, how are we going to explain this to freshmen?"

Q: What's the relation between the kinds of issues CISA concerns itself with and the notion of globalization?

RS: They're inherently related; 'globalization' is a word that gets used a lot but whose meaning is quite slippery. On the one hand, globalization implies an increasing integration of economic frameworks that favors an increased freedom of movement for goods, as in the new WTO and NAFTA pacts. But there's evidence that it also brings with it increasing restrictions on movement of peoples. Europe offers a case in point: While it's possible for European goods, or for a European within the European union, to move relatively easily now from one country to another, the borders of Europe itself are being shored up to make it much, much harder for people outside Europe to get in.

Globalization has also radically altered the nature of migration and diaspora. At one time, many immigrants came to the new world with the expectation that they would never go home again. That's really no longer the case, except in instances where people cannot return home for fear of political oppression. Even in these cases, modern telecommunications and modes of transportation allow for continuing contact with the old world. So the way people think about their old lives in relation to their new ones has fundamentally changed. But diaspora has never been restricted to the notion that one literally goes home again. Sometimes the return is simply mythical, a kind of ideal or a kind of comforting psychological space. Today the 'return' can, in fact, take place several times within a person's real lifetime. Within the old immigration paradigm of the 'host' country and the 'guest' immigrant, the host had something to offer, and the 'well-mannered' guest accepted whatwas offered. By contrast, many now arrive with the notion that they bring something to the host, which ongoing contact with their old country reinforces. It's not that people don't want to integrate into a new society: it's that the terms of that integration have changed markedly because continuing contact provides them with a certain kind of leverage with which to negotiate their identities that may not have existed in quite the same way before. Similarly, people are now able to see themselves as belonging to global sexual communities, for example. This kind of globalization doesn't so much constitute an alternative to nation or ethnicity as force a discussion of the ways in which forms of national or ethnic belonging are gendered or hierarchicized sexually, both among groups and within each group.

Q: What implications do all these issues have for governance, for how people establish their identity as citizens?

RS: They have many implications that go both ways. The notion of globalization often brings with it the assumption that because things are becoming more integrated, somehow traditional national sovereignty doesn't matter as much, that boundaries don't matter. That formulation, in my judgment, is much too simplistic. It's certainly true that one complement to the globalization of markets seems to be the much greater possibility of the assertion of identities: People have multiple identities, and they're in a sense much freer to assert those because there are all these new networks that can support those identitarian claims.

By contrast, when you look at even the most stridently universalizing models, such as France, you see within them certain assumptions about the public and private realm. The unspoken assumption there that the "citizen" is of Christian background, if not of Christian belief, has enormous implications for governance when you begin having a sizable community in your country that is not of Christian origin. Muslims of North African origin, and their French-born children, for instance, seek recognition and integration into a specific juridical entity with which they have a long historical relationship, specifically colonialism and its unresolved traces in the present.

Q: Returning much closer to home, how are these issues of cultural identity and community playing out on our own campuses?

RS: One approach has been to assert a particular identity as one's unique expression of authenticity. The result is a number of competing identity claims, many of which are based on a demand for the redress of very real forms of historical injustice or historical oppression. Many people involved in these kinds of politics have found that appealing to the democratic or liberal sentiments of people in power, or even their guilt, is a way to get something. In fact, it may be the only way to get anything! Because otherwise the experience of 'integrating' these various claims has often been reduced to the question of representation in the most literal, minimal sense. It's as if as long as you have one representative of this group or of that group in a governing body, the body doesn't feel compelled to rethink what the integration of these voices might mean for its overall mission or orientation. The 'pacifying,' often cynical, assumption is that each group making a claim should be given its niche, or its little alcove, and that will solve everything. Again, the center holds.

In a sense, the whole purpose of a center like CISA is to get people talking precisely about the kinds of questions you just asked: What are the implications of this for governance? In other words, what are the implications for how we do politics, or how we govern the affairs of our common community, whether that be local, on campus, or on the level of the State? Is there a way of acting politically that isn't all against all, and doesn't simply reduce questions of identity to serial or pluralistic representation? Many of the courses the Center will be developing will focus on the question of what we want our students to be thinking about in terms of their role as citizens of the Americas as we come into the 21st century.

Q: At this stage, what kinds of activities are under way under the aegis of the Center?

RS: Between 60 and 70 faculty members are taking part in four different seminars running concurrently this semester. Each has developed its own particular orientation and reading list out of a common beginning, but we plan to bring those groups back together at the end of the semester. And from that convergence, we hope to emerge with teams of faculty ready to begin designing the first courses in our program over the summer. We have made a very deliberate decision not to use the individual stipend model for course development. If we were to get people talking to each other who don't normally speak to each other-across disciplines, across schools-we needed a mechanism to bring them together. Rather than simply funding people to do something that they've already thought about, we want the stipends given out by the Center to support things that they're going to think about through our seminars. What we're saying is, "We want you to go through the process of talking to your colleagues within the framework provided by the faculty seminar to develop topics together for future courses, and then when you come out as a group at the other end of this, and say, 'I want to work with X, Y and Z around this kind of a course,' then we'll provide you with funding to actually do it." In that way, the curriculum will have been shaped by a larger discussion.

Q: Earlier in our conversation, you said that the Center hopes to introduce students to the "crossroads" framework--the "governing notion of the Center's work"--from the very beginning of their educational experience. How will that occur?

RS: We've envisioned the curricular component of the Center's work as a kind of two-tiered system, where there would be one layer of courses offered at the freshman level, and then a series of more advanced courses at the senior level, including a kind of senior seminar. That will represent a major initiative for the five colleges because, although we obviously have experience with team teaching and with people teaching at a college not their own, this would be the first time a programmatic set of courses would be specifically designed to be taught across colleges, across disciplines by teams of faculty. At the core of our program, then, is a fundamental transformation of the undergraduate curriculum.

Q: What in your judgment might be the best outcome of the Center's work?

RS: The best outcome, from my perspective, would be a new curriculum--one that fulfills the urgency that many of the people coming to this project have felt for introducing students immediately to issues of culture and citizenship as they are posed today. Since the 1960s, universities have been challenged to allow in a whole series of voices and experiences that had never been heard or had never been thought worthy of recognition in institutions of higher learning. And even though that work is not yet finished--the results of squashing of affirmative action in admissions to the University of California system show us just how fragile such gains may be--it is also true that studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality may also become institutionalized in particular ways, and this often results in isolating groups and even kinds of curriculum from each other as a claim is made for a kind of positive, self-sufficient presence for each of them.

So, there are at least two different issues at stake here. One is pedagogical: How do we teach as teachers? Teaching is meant to be critical and disruptive--to demand of people that they ask questions of things that they take for granted in life and things that they feel sure about. Now, when you talk about identities that are racial or ethnic or sexual, it's a little more complicated, because the messages that minoritized or marginalized groups have been getting throughout most of their lives isn't necessarily a simple one of being able to take those identities for granted or to feel in any way proud of them or good about them.

And that conundrum constitutes the crux of the second issue. There's often a tendency for people to think that through counter-hegemonic cultural practices, questions of citizenship and the State can somehow be avoided, but If all we're saying to students is, "Here is a role model with which you can identify; here is an identity to which you can owe a particular kind of allegiance," then I think we're also not serving them well either. In fact, some of the most profound literature that comes out of any particular experience often asks very disturbing questions about the identities of people within that experience, but it's not easy in a classroom to teach or present that material when what students are often seeking spontaneously is a form of validation. There is work to be done where those two conflicting needs meet, otherwise we risk cutting off the kind of critical thought an individual needs to be part of the polis, to be part of the community as a whole. In other words, when a student comes to the university as a freshman, it's perfectly legitimate for that student, if she's Latina, for example, or he's gay, to expect to see courses in the curriculum that speak to that experience. But it's also true that each student has a whole range of experiences in the world that are shared by people who do not have that particular identity, and that people who share that identity also have a series of different perspectives on the world.

Subject positions are multiple and shifting in their respective importance in each individual's life; recognizing this has profound implications for our ability to develop a curriculum that has students learning from each other and together, and especially for countering a logic of fragmentation that so many have found distressing.

Q: What makes it possible to have such a conversation, a crossroads, now and not, say, 10 years ago?

RS: Most people will tell you that in their experience disciplinary boundaries today are much less comfortable than they were at some other point, and that the conversations we are seeking to structure have already been taking place within these discrete disciplines for some time. Certainly, as the various disciplines have moved to try and accommodate some of these questions, they have inevitably bumped up against each other. New theoretical approaches that have developed above and around disciplines have also brought people together in ways that we want the Center to concretize. We want that discussion to be directed toward the implementation of courses so that the conversation can spill over into the classroom.

Q: Will the new courses the Center proposes to introduce change or expand the definition of a liberal arts curriculum?

RS: The issues the Center is concerned with have real implications, as you've said earlier, for the ways in which our societies are governed and the ways in which we are able or not able to play roles as citizens. And those are the kinds of questions we want to be asking of our undergraduates right from the beginning. In fact, it's the one thing that, it seems to me, a liberal arts curriculum really must do at this time. Until fairly recently, cultural and intellectual production--the symbolic sectors of human activity, if you will--enjoyed some autonomy, however relative, from the logic of the market. But I think today many people in the humanities feel viscerally that this is under attack, that more and more of what you hear today about universities is the notion that they need to directly serve the economic needs of a particular form of social organization, which means that the university itself is expected to be an economic player, and that the students should expect to be trained for very specific kinds of jobs into which they can fit. What it means is that the liberal arts curriculum itself, which ideally is a curriculum for turning out good citizens, critical thinkers, and people who are aware of themselves as citizens of larger communities and of the world, is reduced to a kind of service function.

Q: CISA is an answer to that, isn't it?

RS: Well, it's trying to be. And what's interesting about the Center is that it brings together in a very concrete way people in the traditional liberal arts fields with people from the professional schools: We have faculty in our seminars from the University's School of Management sitting alongside colleagues from the humanities and social sciences, and from the natural sciences. We're all involved in a common project here, but it has nothing to do with turning the liberal arts into a direct support structure for economic performance.

Q: What kinds of activities do you anticipate the Center will be supporting in the near future?

RS: By September, we'll have filled a visiting appointment for a two- year term. We expect to appoint someone who brings a comparative-theoretical perspective to his or her work in looking at the multiplicity of groups that might fall under our program. That person will introduce new courses that we expect to serve as one focal point alongside the other courses that are being developed. The Center might also play a role in supplementing curricular areas that are underdeveloped within the various institutions. We also have talked about having a fellows program, which would involve faculty members who are working on course development in any specific year, perhaps graduate students or even undergraduates doing senior theses in areas related to the Center's program. We would also hope to bring in teachers from the local public schools through the fellowship program. Even as we begin to develop and offer new courses through the Center, we intend to continue hosting faculty seminars to encourage faculty to talk to each other across the disciplines, across colleges, around topics that might be more or less specific in nature but always related to the Center's program. One of the chief components of our work is to get students involved directly, not just by attending courses that we offer, but also by encouraging research that more advanced students would do on the topics that are related to our Center . . . We have our first student symposium coming up this May.

For more information about the Crossroads in the Study of the Americas program, contact program director Robbie Schwartzwald by e-mail at rss@frital.umass.edu